Lyndia Carter History Blazer, March 1996 Wherever Thomas Giles went, music traveled with him. Crowds gathered to hear this master coax lovely melodies from his harp. He was much in demand throughout northern Utah, and nowhere was his music more welcome than in Brigham Young’s home. His talent and skill were unusual, but there was something else that made Giles …
19th-Century Utah Women Spun Yarn and Also Dug Ditches
W. Paul Reeve History Blazer, January 1995 In 1870, 13.3 percent of American women over age ten were working outside of the home. By the end of the nineteenth century, largely due to expanding businesses, this figure climbed to nearly 20 percent of American women. Over the same period Utah’s female work force grew from 4 percent to 13.5 percent …
Alice Parker Isom Faced Frontier Utah’s Challenges with True Grit
W. Paul Reeve History Blazer, July 1995 Rural family life in 19th-century Utah often required family members to share daily responsibilities. Frequently wives shouldered heavy domestic burdens as well as helped with farming and other tasks. Even for two-parent families, providing adequate clothing and food was often very difficult and required stamina and perseverance. For those parents who faced the …
Oliver B. Huntington and His Bees
Cane sugar was expensive in territorial Utah because it had to be shipped long distances by sea and railroad. So, many Utahns kept a few hives of bees and traded honey with their neighbors. One beekeeper in Springville was Oliver Boardman Huntington who lived on a small farm where he kept a cow, put up alfalfa hay, planted a garden, …
Utah Farmers and the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush
Miriam B. Murphy History Blazer, February 1996 Although the first years of white settlement in Utah brought many hardships, including food shortages, by the late 1850s local farmers were producing a surplus of food. Unfortunately, historian LeRoy R. Hafen noted, the nearest settled areas—California, Oregon, and New Mexico—lay hundreds of miles away over deserts and mountains, making profitable trade unlikely. …
Pioneering African Americans
Miriam B. Murphy Beehive History 22 The names Green Flake, Hark Lay, and Oscar Crosby are inscribed on monuments and remembered by Utah school children as the three African American slaves who came to Utah with the first company of Mormon pioneers. Beyond that, most children and adults know little about the three men and even less about the free …
The Gardo House: A History of the Mansion and Its Occupants
On November 26, 1921, a crowd gathered at 70 E. South Temple Street in downtown Salt Lake City to watch the demolition of a Victorian mansion. One onlooker was ninety-year-old John Brown. In spite of the November chill and the fact that it was his birthday, Brown had come to pay his last respects to the doomed building; he had …
Unsolved Mysteries in Utah—The Bizarre Case of Grave Robber Jean Baptiste
Yvette D. Ison History Blazer, March 1995 Those who knew and loved young Moroni Clawson were no doubt saddened by his death in January 1862 and may have even witnessed his burial in the city cemetery on the north bench of Salt Lake City. Several days later, however, their private grief turned public. An event had occurred that, according to …
The Lives of Six Pioneer Girls
Becky Bartholomew History Blazer, September 1996 The life stories of six cousins—Clarissa Wilcox, Martha Wilcox, Mabel Wilcox, Luella Hurst, Ida Hurst, and Mary Young—born in three Utah towns between 1863 and 1893 reveal what it was like to be a girl growing up in pioneer Utah. First memories: Martha was only five years old when someone came to the house …
Hilda Anderson Erickson, Working Woman
Becky Bartholomew History Blazer, October 1995 Women’s current struggle to balance home and career may seem new. But long before the turn of the century at least one Utah woman was combining home duties with four outside careers and apparently thriving. Hilda Anderson came to Utah in 1866 from Sweden as a seven-year-old. In Grantsville she learned early to work …